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November '18

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18 • November 2018 • S I G N & D I G I T A L G R A P H I C S
ARCHITECTURAL
AND
ENVIRONMENTAL
Wordy Wall Job is Fun with a Laser
Creating letters with black acrylic
B Y R I C K W I L L I A M S
Shop Talk
In the end, though just handling the multitude of parts was
somewhat time consuming, the project went quite well and
absolutely predictable, and our client loved the results. Some
of the exact methods used, and illustrated here, may help other
sign makers save time or avoid mistakes on similar projects.
As one can tell from the photos, some of the elements we
made for this project were fairly large, and most sign shop
lasers, including ours, are not. Our Trotec 120-watt laser will
handle sheets approximately 24" x 39" in size, and the large
"Zeid" logo was well over that size. Also, the metal overlays
on that logo and the lettering, which went below it, featured
brushed aluminum centers, which cannot be cut on the type
of laser we have.
So, the large items of black acrylic, and the overlay parts that
were actually made of metal were cut on a
CNC waterjet. The
other vast number of parts were cut on our laser. The acrylic
used for the entire project was simply 3/16" thick gloss black.
A small amount of clear acrylic, also 3/16" thick, was used
to make special mounting hardware. This custom mounting
hardware was made in-house using the laser.
For the install patterns we used regular white poster board,
which is easily and rapidly cut on a laser, and of course patterns
made this way are incredibly accurate. The letters in the poster
board patterns were made 1/16" thicker in stroke width so the
patterns could easily be removed away from the lettering after
installation.
Though the largest acrylic parts also had to be cut on the
waterjet, the .040 brushed aluminum parts were too, and for
both of them a sacrificial sheet of coroplast (which happened
to be orange in color) was used to reduce potentially damaging
splash back when the stream of water crosses over the slats that
support the work. This is fairly harmless with thicker metal but
can be damaging to plastic and thin aluminum sheet and may
cause edge flaws that can be seen from the front.
Actually, the cutting of the many parts of this job was actu-
ally the easiest part of the work. However, putting the metal
parts over the logo and accompanying lettering needed to
be done right the first time, since repositioning them would
be impossible without damaging the parts made of thin .040
brushed aluminum sheet.
This step, however, was carefully dealt with by using a sim-
ple method of putting temporary paper spacers between the
metal and acrylic parts, and only when absolutely certain they
were aligned perfectly would the spacers be removed, allowing
the double-sided adhesive to bond the parts in place.
A
few weeks ago, we completed one of the most wordy
projects of individual letters and logos I can remember
doing. It was for a women's medical clinic in a nearby city, and
the staff wanted to decorate a large interior wall with a custom
raised logo and also their entire mission and vision statements
and more.
I believe in the end it was made of more than 175 items,
mostly black acrylic but some of it would be two-tone with
elements overlaid with .040 brushed aluminum sheet. The
unwieldy number of parts was made more manageable by using
a laser to easily cut the vast majority of the lettering, and also
laser cutting perfect poster board installation patterns to aid
the work in the field.
Rick Williams owns Rick's Sign Company, a
commercial sign shop in Longview, Texas.
He has been in the sign industry since 1973
and documenting the sign business since
1986. Contact him at RickSignCo@aol.com.
This very wordy inside wall job combined a couple of technologies,
but the acrylic cutting ability of a laser really makes this work practi-
cal and profitable.